Sunday, May 07, 2006

Antipodes as Toads…/Socratic Frog Prince

*Cornel West accuses Socrates of abandoning poetics.

Memories of the night past trickle through a Sunday. Large candied apple types--raw content caramelized with emotional feedback. The remembering is a process, unconscious, beginning to twirl faintly in this haze, to a music box tune (which avoids quaint through sips of café espresso). Ink blots form memory’s hand crank. It is the absence of configuration, which gently coaxes the mind to iconic trails.

The will postures its command. It wants the bottom-feeder reading—the ugly Socratic shovel that leaves two antipodes…The antipodes that a clerk files into personality. This file is then reproduced in telling, accessible by outsiders, conditioning expressivity (like a room décor or a subtle lighting configuration for the “deep ones”). “It is inescapable,” cries Virginia Wolf, “the vulgar reproduction of antipodes.”

File à Room à House à Nation à Empire. Where in this mimesis do we heed the I = eye? The I = Nation? Without the epithet of reason, the equations of spirit will fossilize. To accept reason’s member we risk forgetting, the ethereal dimension, zat uncontingent authenticity. But the alternative is grim. So we suspend double consciousness (as remembering) "until" a better opportunity commences.

I suggest, says the spirit, above the rustling of Will and haze, we make the antipodes hop. Instantaneously, the dissected antipodes are made into toads, driving the mind to new pre-human horizons. The category of self is pasteurized.